


Fine Print

by Crait



Series: It Moves All the Same [2]
Category: Iron Man (Comics), Marvel (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, M/M, Near Future, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-14 00:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16482617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crait/pseuds/Crait
Summary: Victor is in Tony's workshop. It's definitely not a metaphor for anything else.





	Fine Print

**Author's Note:**

> I think some of my timeline calculations here regarding Tony's various brushes with amnesia don't quite add up, apologies!

Victor's tucked in a corner of Tony's workshop. He's about four-thousand pages into what appears to be an eight-thousand page tome on sorcery; Tony doesn't know enough yet to recognize what it's about, and reading over Victor's shoulder is made even more difficult by the realization that Victor might read faster than Tony himself. Show-off.

He also has StarkCAD open in front of him—and beside him, and above him, because that's the beauty of a holographic software suite—for the unorthodox application of spell design. His cowl is pushed back and his helmet is retracted, but he's still on his feet, brooding with crossed arms in the direction of book and program because he can't sit on a stool like a normal techno-wizard genius autocrat.

What astonishes Tony about all of this isn't how easily he's accepted Victor into his space. What astonishes him is that Victor is in his space at all—and this isn't merely Tony's bedroom or his boardroom; this is the holy of holies. He keeps the Iron Man here. He keeps it in cases on the walls, model after model marching along in a functional monument to progress, and he keeps it in the AI memory banks stored in his private servers, and he keeps in the drafts locked in the digital vaults of the Stark Tower data spine, and he keeps it in the disassembled parts that live on his benches, and he keeps it inside himself, in the chambers of his heart and skull. If Iron Man has a home, it's here, in Tony Stark's workshop. If Tony Stark has a place of worship, it's here, at Iron Man's feet.

And then into that sanctuary comes this blasphemous interloper who is nonetheless one of the few and maybe the _only_ person to not only understand but believe in the doctrine that endures here. He fits. It's wildly improbable. Tony doesn't have a plan for this.

"You know," he says, "I once fired an executive for selling components to you."

Victor swivels his head and arches one imperious brow.

"And now you're rummaging around in my workshop like you own it," Tony concludes.

"There is a lesson you would do well to heed," Victor says.

"Oh yeah? What lesson?"

"That you fail to have a high enough standard for your lackeys," Victor says.

Tony feels his lips twitch. "You know what, I can't tell if you're serious or joking. I'm not even sure which case would be funnier. Serious, probably." Then, because he's feeling a little proprietary, he drifts over to Victor and slings his arm over Victor's shoulders.

Victor looks right, at Tony's hand over his shoulders. He looks left, at Tony's face. His expression settles into lines of _I choose to allow this,_ but his mouth never develops the pinch that says he genuinely objects.

"This is a dimensional conduit," he says, pointing at the main holographic array. "Or will be, when I'm finished."

"See, this is how I know the magic has really gone out of our relationship," Tony says. "I remember the days when you used to call _me_ lackey."

"I assure you, we are not lacking magic," Victor says, blank-faced, holding out a hand between them so one of his holographic spell arrays rotates gently above his palm.

"God, I hate you. So, dimensional conduit? No invocation needed?"

"Precisely," Victor says. "Lesser mortals have never…" And he's off. There has to be a limit on how many twelve-syllable words someone can use in a sentence, and yet… This has to be the reason that Victor and Reed bonded once upon a time. Empire State isn't exactly small change when it comes to harboring future members of the global brain trust, but Tony doubts many of the professors there could keep up with either of them, to say nothing of their peers. Like Riri, who'd already been frustrated with the limitations of MIT at the ripe old age of fifteen.

Tony absorbs the lecture on a surface level, stashing it away to review later; even though _technically_ the current iteration of the Iron Man is purely an advanced motor neuroprosthesis, he's made a couple of recent adjustments that allow him to offload visual and auditory inputs in real-time from his brain to the suit and thereby to additional external storage. This one'll be filed as 'Victor Lectures Me About Magic 00134.srk'. When he figures out a way to market point-of-view livestreams, it's going to go viral.

In the meantime, he looks at Victor.

Everything about this situation is still so confusingly, amusingly novel that he can't quite believe it. Consequently, he stares a lot. Especially from this angle, Victor is still as supercilious as they come. He is—and this is appalling, but at least the difference isn't significant—slightly taller than Tony. Also broader. A lot broader. Victor's a big guy, and now that he's gained back the muscle mass he lost in the aftermath of the universe rebooting itself, he looks ready to wrestle a lion at the drop of a hat. And he has this way of talking; he's not loud a lot of the time, but he projects, like he expects you to listen, like it never entered his mind that he isn't the most interesting (or intimidating) person in the room. He's usually right, too, not that Tony plans on telling him that. Tony's still a little uneasy admitting it to himself. 

"Hey," he says. "Press the pause button for a minute." Predictably, Victor doesn't look _thrilled_ about the direction this conversation is taking, but Tony could get away with a lot even before Victor decided to follow him around making eyes and being 'helpful'. "There's something I've been meaning to ask you—"

From behind them comes a hiss followed by the dulcet sound of a very expensive, very advanced, very secure door sliding open almost silently. Simultaneously, Victor's helmet crawls up his spine and skull and snaps shut over his face.

"Look, I know you've got problems of your own, but I caught my niece making upgrades to my suit three times this week." Rhodey. "Can't you, I don't know… lock it down somehow? Make it prodigy-proof?"

"I can send her better parts," Tony says automatically. Victor's already up and running his anti-intruder personality. Hands clasped behind his back, stance braced, mask distant and imperious. He's almost like a Doombot. Tony had actually entertained that concern a couple of times during their first few… lessons? Assignations? Victor had laid those fears to rest in the most dramatic way possible. Blood wasn't… _not_ involved.

"Oh," Rhodey says. "Uh, I can come back—"

Tony unhands his frenemy-with-benefits. "You're in New York, what, three days out of every three hundred? It's fine, come in, stop making that face."

"I'm not making a face," Rhodey says. "Hi, doctor." Which is how he addresses Victor. Tony knew Rhodey was starting to see the light when he dropped 'Doom' for sounding too hostile. 'Victor' is out of the question for obvious reasons.

"Colonel," Victor says. "Anthony. If you'll excuse me." It isn't a question.

"Sure?" Tony says. He isn't surprised Victor is leaving; Rhodey knows about the magic lessons and the accompanying torrid affair, and Pepper and Happy probably know but have at least kept their gossip confined to their marriage, but Victor mostly just doesn't occupy the same space in Tony's life as the rest of his nearest and dearest, detente with Rhodey notwithstanding.

And then he exits by walking into a wall and vanishing.

"Does he do that a lot?" Rhodey asks.

"Walk into walls?" Tony says. "I don't know. It's more dramatic than teleporting, so probably."

"So how's… you're still…"

"Fine. Yes. If you come closer, I can pat you on the back for trying and we can move on to talking about inertial dampening."

"I'm concerned," Rhodey says. "I don't have a right to be a concerned?" Beneath the teasing edge, there's a seriousness to his expression that only comes out when he thinks Tony's acting against his own self-interest.

"If you want to be concerned about my love life, by all means."

"Tone, don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Go on the defensive. He may have turned over a new leaf, but that doesn't mean he's a good man, it doesn't make him trustworthy, it sure as hell doesn't erase all of the illegal, immoral—"

"Stop," Tony says. "I get it. I'm not walking around with my eyes closed."

"You sure about that?" Rhodey looks at the wall Victor walked through. There's an old Harley-Davidson XA, half-restored, leaning up against that wall. Tony hasn't touched it in ages; at this rate, he'll never get it done. "You don't always… how can I put this… you don't always make the greatest choices when it comes to your heart."

"It's not serious," Tony tries.

"You always say that, but it always is."

"I'll be careful. Come on, you don't have to look that skeptical—Rhodes. I mean it." And when that doesn't wipe the doubt off Rhodey's face: "Eyes wide open."

"Keep 'em that way," says Rhodey. He shifts a little, not really uncomfortable because of the topic—because he and Tony don't have much by way of personal boundaries anymore; Rhodey's seen him in his underwear more than most of his girlfriends—but clearly unhappy that Tony has invited a supervillain into his bed. Maybe _the_ supervillain. Go big or go home. 

"He'd better have your back, is all I'm saying," Rhodey concludes, and then, before the moment can turn touching, changes the subject. "Is there any chance you can make me faster than Captain Marvel?"

"Is that a challenge or just a side-effect of dating Earth's Most Competitive Hero?"

"Ha ha," Rhodey says. "What I'm hearing is 'Sorry, but I can't make you fly faster than some souped-up Chair Force pilot.'"

"What I wonder," Tony says, "is if you talk like that to her face."

"Of course I do," says Rhodey, because of course he does. "You know how many times I've heard the joke about what 'Marine' stands for? She wasn't even in the Navy."

Tony surreptitiously starts keying a search string into the nearest terminal.

Rhodey sighs heavily, as if burdened by the weight of Tony's ignorance. "'My ass rides in Navy equipment,'" he says. "Come on, man. You should know that one by now."

"You're so mean to me. Why should I work on your armor when you're so mean to me?" Tony complains, but he's already pulling up the specs for the latest model of the War Machine. The current iteration is a little sleeker, a little meaner, with more gunmetal gray than silver. Rhodey still insists on supplementing energy weapons with physical ammo for what he calls the 'intimidation factor', which in effect means Tony has to account for the asymmetry of a shoulder-mounted minigun both practically and aesthetically. Bottom line: War Machine is _heavy._

They spend an enjoyable three hours coaxing an additional hundred Newtons of thrust out of War Machine's propulsion system before Rhodey has to take off again on what might be anything from Avengers business to a date with Captain Marvel to a personal errand for the president. Tony tries not to be in what Friday calls a Mood. He gets like that sometimes, wants more of people's attention than he should. At one point in his life, he would have tried to program the flaw out of his behavior. In this brave new world, though, he feels too old or too tired to be anything other than himself.

That afternoon he has a rota of meetings that range from essential to mind-numbingly boring. The first is with Pepper Potts-Hogan, Friday, Jocasta, and Pepper's current cadre of aides, including Mary Jane Watson, who now seems to split her time between marketing and putting out medium-sized fires while Pepper tackles the big ones. There's a brief argument over branding (Pepper finally convinced him to fold everything back under the Stark International name; Tony insisted on keeping Stark Solutions visible as the new face of the conglomerate) before they spend an hour nailing down exactly which parts of the AI rights bill should be non-negotiable and which parts are open to compromise. Pepper will pass the draft along to their contacts in Congress, where with luck and funding and a lick of elbow grease the legislators who still care about that kind of thing will grind the bill into law.

The next meeting is approximately four-hundred percent less interesting. If it were a normal board of directors meeting, Tony would pay attention, because if he's an engineer first, he's a businessman second; but what they're getting today is Sam Moore's biannual ramble through the benefits of expanding into the entertainment field. It's clearly not something any of the rest of them are interested in, but Sam is in her seventies, loves movies despite clearly knowing nothing about their production, has an otherwise great head on her shoulders, and has been a key supporter of Tony's through frankly more risen-from-the-ashes moments than he deserves. The least he can do is give her thirty minutes for her castle in the air.

If his soul slips out of his body as soon as she starts her slideshow… 

He's getting better at this, but it's still one of those moments of sheer, teeth-gritting terror—his body dropping away, the _weightlessness_ of it, almost like those moments when he's up in the suit and he looks down and there's six miles between him and the ground, but at least then he's kept aloft by something he made with his own hands. He trusts his own math. Astral projection is a horse of an entirely different spectrum. He doesn't understand the mechanism; it's terrifying.

But regrettably necessary. Victor's something of a taskmaster as a teacher, and he keeps drilling into Tony the importance of fundamentals. Astral projection is apparently a fundamental. Far be it for him to argue.

He just drifts around the room at first. Studies himself, not out of the vanity most people would ascribe to him but because he's used to seeing himself head-on, in two dimensions; like this he can pick out the slight crookedness of his nose, the scar under the notch in his jaw. He doesn't look thirty anymore. He's not dramatic enough to call himself old, but he's older.

After that, he sinks through the floor. 

The current Stark Tower will be, if Tony has his way, the _last_ Stark Tower. He's sick of rebuilding; just once, he wants something he makes to last. After the prior incarnation at Times Square was destroyed during the mess with the Inhumans, he repurchased the building on Columbus Circle, where the _first_ Stark Tower had been constructed and then reconstructed too many years ago. He likes being able to look out over Central Park. It reminds him of the old mansion on Fifth Avenue. When he and Thor and Steve started up the team again, he'd thought about offering up the mansion, but then he'd thought twice. Instead, the Avengers are housed at the top of Stark Tower. The team is different than it was, and that's okay. The mansion was for the days when they were all a little younger, maybe a little dumber, maybe a little brighter, when they all rattled around and made it a home and _lived_ there. In the Tower, there's more freedom to come and go. You show up, you've got a room; you need to leave, that's fine, too.

The Avengers are up. Tony goes down.

He drops through the executive floors pretty fast before he hits the Maria Stark Foundation. There are good people here; their job is to spend Tony's money in the best ways possible, and they're better-suited to that job than Tony himself. Below the Foundation are the various other non-profits connected to Stark International, plus a lot of subsidiaries; not everything is headquartered here, particularly now that the Long Island plant is up and running again, but most of the Stark Group's major components are housed somewhere beneath the Avengers.

He keeps going down. Past the residential levels, past the floors leased out to partners, past the lobby and the basement parking garage. This is where the real gem is buried, deep at the root of the building; in the sub-basement is his workshop. It's the closest thing he has to home.

Originally, in the first couple of Stark Towers, his shop was closer to his penthouse suite, but there's a lot you can do when you're buried underground that you can't do in the open air. It's more secure, for one thing, and it's also a hell of a lot faster to get large pieces of equipment down here without resorting to airlifting them to the quinjet hangar. His living quarters still have a place for him to tinker, but this workshop is the best workshop he's ever built, deep and cavernous and stocked with every tool and material and idea Tony can pull out of his brain.

War Machine's specs are still open on one of the drafting boards. This is the one place in the world where Tony doesn't have to worry about leaving armor designs out in the open; only five people other than Tony have access codes to make it through his security, and the mystical protection originally laid down by Stephen Strange and Wanda Maximoff was recently reinforced by someone fully capable of integrating magical wards with electronic countermeasures.

But all those countermeasures have been keyed to recognize Tony, even in astral form, so he walks into the shop like a visitor would walk into a museum—with the aim of seeing, not touching. He can't manipulate the physical world like this, at least not yet, but…

Actually, that isn't true. Actually, there's one other place in the world he could leave the suit's secrets out in the open, and that's in the laboratory in Castle Doom. It's as secure as Tony's own workshop, and there's nothing in his notes that Victor couldn't reverse-engineer on his own. That's a staggering thought. There was a time in his life when he went to war because someone else had gotten their hands on his tech, and now he's opening his life lock, stock, and barrel to a man who once used nanotechnology to infiltrate and rob Wakanda's vibranium vault. It's not a joke. He's loading this gun himself, one bullet in the cylinder at a time: six shots that can't miss in the hands of a maniac who isn't on his second chance but his seventieth.

Tony knows he over-identifies with Victor. He left his own second and third and fourth chances in the dust long ago; his hands are not clean. What rattles his cage, though—what rattles around in his thoughts, clanging and clanking like chains against bars—is that he can't pinpoint the moment when suspicion converted into trust. There's a missing catalyst there, a gap in his emotional continuity (never the most stable progression in the first place) that might predate Victor handing over his Wand of Watoomb in the ruins of Doomstadt. 

A couple of years ago, he found a recording made by the Iron Man. Tony's dealt with gaps in his memory before, and unlike the hell that Carol Danvers has gone through, with her memories stolen from her not once but twice, Tony's undergone those losses willingly. He's missing a year after Wanda blasted the idea of the Avengers to dust, when Norman Osborn demanded access to the superhero registry and Tony flipped him the bird by deleting that same registry from his own brainpan—

But that hadn't been Wanda's fault. Who had been pulling her strings? Be honest with yourself, you coward; it's the monster sharing your bed. That was the moment when it all went irreversibly wrong, a cascading series of failures: Scott and Clint and the Vision all dead, Wanda gone, the mutant decimation straight into Congress forcing the Superhuman Registration Act, the Skrull invasion, the rise of Osborn, the fall of Asgard, the Illuminati and the incursions and the total destruction of everything Tony had ever known and loved. There was nothing he hadn't sacrificed during those years; he left behind his self-regard, his dignity, his sobriety, and his hope. And then, just when it seemed like a new morning, Rhodey had died, and Carol had—and _Steve_ —

God. He's so tired. He's so tired, and he's forging a partnership with the man who was, if not the primary architect of his tragedies, certainly one author of his misery.

Can Doom really change that dramatically? Can anyone? Tony likes to think that he's changed that much, that he's better now, smarter, faster, kinder, stronger; but in retrospect, his entire life has been a struggle for atonement. If he really were better, he wouldn't have a chain of failures stretching from the present back to the first time Howard Stark put a glass of single-malt bourbon in his son's hand and Tony was too weak to refuse.

There's a picture pulled up on a monitor in the corner, a screencap from old surveillance footage. Sam Wilson's Avengers are standing on the street, facing Victor during his "I am Iron Man" days. His cowl's up, but the mask is off, and he's staring the new Wasp, Nadia Pym, dead in the eye. Despite her bulky helmet, she still seems excited, inquisitive—a world away from the rest of the Avengers, who look as defensive as it's possible to look without all of them trying to fit behind Sam's shield. 

That's another question Tony's never had adequately answered. Why had Victor fixated on him? Why had he taken up Tony's mantle? Iron Man has never been a legacy, not in the way Captain America or Ms. Marvel are. Rhodey's stepped in for Tony, carried on the work when Tony was unable, but Iron Man was never something he planned on handing down. It's his penance, his salvation, his chance to be better and do better. 

A couple of years ago, he found a recording in the suit. The file had been played once before, during the time that he stole from himself. After Extremis, the advent of his transhuman era, but before the fall of Asgard. Sometimes he wonders why he gave up on all those old dreams of union, of building Iron Man into his own body.

Anyway, the recording itself predates the sole time it was played by another lengthy gap. In the recording, he's wearing the old Model 9 armor while he and Doctor Doom (and this, make no mistake, _is_ Doctor Doom) work together against an extradimensional threat. It goes on for hours: Tony in Doom's castle, Tony and Doom staring each other down over a sword, Tony and Doom back-to-back on a vast green plain. Tony doesn't remember it. There's a lot he doesn't remember.

There's that recording, and then there's this still image: Victor, Nadia, the Avengers. Something big and hulking (but not Hulkling) and probably extradimensional is out-of-focus behind them in the Manhattan street. Pink sludge on Wasp's shoulder—Tony doesn't want to know. He'd pulled up that frame because of how vividly and succinctly it summarizes the collision of Victor's change-of-heart with reality, but also because the idea of Doom as Iron Man is…

Ineffable. Appealing, maybe; or revolting. He can't reconcile the dissonance. Like astral projection—something else that he hates he can't explain even though he benefits from it nonetheless.

He closes his eyes, which Victor would probably tell him was unnecessary, and lets himself become unmoored again. Goes up this time, not through the tower but outside of it. He can't go very far from his physical body and has been repeatedly instructed to not even attempt entering another dimension by himself, but his range is still about a cubic mile. In Manhattan, a cubic mile encompasses about seventy thousand people. There's still plenty to see.

He ends up over the park, on the opposite side from Fifth Avenue. Tony's not strictly speaking an outdoors person; he grew up here, in the city, and in other cities like it, but he likes the park—an oasis of green. It appeals to his design aesthetic, having something organic caged and protected by all the steel and concrete of oh GOD—

It's a flash-bang in reverse: the world goes cold and dark in a single snap. He can't hear. He can't see; and without his body, he has no sense of himself, of where he is, except that thin golden tether that stretches to where his soul is trapped in a cold dark world where NOTHING ELSE EXISTS. It stretches and stretches and stretches stretches stretches—

— _snaps_ —

And he slams back into the physical world so hard he cracks his face against the boardroom table.

"Tony?"

"Emergency," he chokes out. It takes him a second to remember how to talk. It takes him another to climb to his feet. There's so much visual noise—all that was taken away returned to him so fast he can't parse the feed. "Sorry, I have to…"

Friday's in his ear as soon as he hits the hall. "Tony, your vitals are spiking."

"I need eyes on Central Park."

A pause. He slams into the elevator as soon as the doors open. "No unusual activity," Friday says. "What am I looking for?"

"Uh—shit. Get a satellite feed, give me a thermal scan. Flag any localized abnormalities."

"Hot or cold?"

"Cold." He doesn't have to bother pushing the buttons; Friday's already shooting him to the roof as fast as the express elevator can move. 

"Should I alert the Avengers?"

He's tempted. He's always tempted. "No. Find out what Rhodey's up to. Stand by on the Avengers."

"Got it, boss." The door slides open. When he steps out, his shoes have been replaced by jet boots. The rest of the armor's nano-machine scales bleed up his legs, his spine, his skull: graphene's bastard on a titanium-gold matrix, powered by repulsor technology, assisted by an onboard AI, guided by the system with the most sophisticated understanding of the Iron Man enhancile in the world…

Tony's brain.

He takes off before he can take a third step, skims the surface of the roof, hits the edge, and lets himself drop. Altitude isn't the point. He needs to be as close as possible to get a lock on… whatever it was he felt. Because the thing is, right now he's starting to doubt himself. He's still a novice at magic, still doesn't entirely trust it or like it even though he will reluctantly admit to being fascinated with it. Maybe what he felt wasn't evil or wrong. Maybe he just got spooked.

When he cuts over 59th, someone screams. 

"Friday—!"

"Not a problem, boss," she says. "Just an excited fan on the street. I have an ETA on Colonel Rhodes. Five minutes."

"Knew he was still in town. How's that map coming?"

The HUD puts an overlay on top of his visual feed. Six different spots in the park are flagged. He hauls himself up short over a playground and hovers while he tries to rack his memory, but travel in astral form is nebulous. It's not quite linear in the way that movement through the physical world is; one minute he was in his workshop, and the next he was swooping upward, and then he was in the park, being eaten by the cold spot.

"Correlate any unusual energy readings," he says.

Two of the markers drop away.

"What's left?"

"Before I tell you," Friday murmurs in his ear, "I'm going to recommend that you wait for Colonel Rhodes to arrive before you investigate further."

"Okay," Tony says. "Sure. What about that one?" He points randomly off to his left. Sixty feet below, twelve kids swivel their heads to look west.

"It might be an ice cream truck," Friday admits.

"Are you really telling me we have no way of knowing?"

"There's a tree in the way," Friday says.

"Switch to infrared."

"There's a lot of trees in the way."

"Seriously? I'm trying to save the world—"

"You're trying to figure out something you know nothing about that you only encountered because you were playing with forces you don't understand," Friday says mildly, which is pretty impressively mild. She's grown up a lot in the past few years.

"Okay," Tony says. He'll wait. He could call Rhodey up, but Friday's probably briefed him already, and he isn't going to offer anything other than seconding Friday's insistence that Tony wait for backup.

What frustrates him the most is that he doesn't know how the cold spot will present itself when he's not in astral form. He's not, and this is a bitter pill, but he's not confident enough yet with any magic to give it another shot when something dangerous is around. The spot may not have been anything magical, even; Tony's seen it before, when a hole opens to some other world. Dimensional tunneling. Or maybe it isn't anything sinister at all.

He hears War Machine before he sees him, but Rhodey's traveling fast enough that the difference is miniscule, and he hauls up short next to Tony with that signature whine of repulsors.

"Hey," he says. "You waited. I didn't think you were going to wait, but historically speaking, that means whatever you're looking for is big and nasty."

"I don't know what I'm looking for," Tony retorts. "I thought you were busy?"

"Not 'meeting with the president' busy," Rhodey says. "I was at the Triskelion."

"With the Wakandans?"

"Nah, they're talking about starting the Ultimates back up." This is not only idle chatter; while they're talking, Rhodey is collecting his own readings on the area, drawing his own conclusions. "Where'd you want to start? Friday, got any ideas?"

"My ability to collect data on mystical energy is limited," Friday says. "There is a high concentration of activity in the vicinity, but most of it is benign."

"Tone?"

Okay. Okay: think. They don't have any parameters other than 'cold' and 'possibly magical'. The situation is pressing but probably not urgent; they could investigate each of Friday's sites, but…

"Hang on," he says. "I'm going to try something."

Meditating is really nothing more than patterning his thoughts, and Tony's good at that—thinking in structures, in layers. He falls into a light trance state and focuses first on his breathing and then on the path of his breath. When he exhales, he follows that path outward, to memory.

He opens his eyes.

"There," he says, and he points north. "Belvedere Castle."

"Huh. You sure?"

"Nope," he says, "but it's a starting point. I want us on the ground at least three hundred yards out, in case this thing shorts out electrical systems."

"Armor's hardened against that kind of attack."

"Maybe. Probably. There's a lot of different flavors of magic."

Rhodey groans. "I hate magic."

"Me too."

"No you don't, you traitor."

"Does 'sometimes' count?" He probably lost his membership in the I Hate Magic club around the time he started looking forward to working with Victor and definitely well before he understood the difference between an invocation and a summoning. Oh well. Instead of waiting for Rhodey to answer, he takes off towards the marker on his HUD, zero to one-fifty in less than a heartbeat. His heart does that now—beats on its own. Rhodey's right on his heels, flight just as fast, reaction almost as quick. Sometimes he's quicker. That's the great thing about Rhodey; he's always in arm's reach, just behind or just ahead.

He goes to set down well away from the castle when Rhodey barks in his ear, "Stairs!"

"You can walk up stairs in the suit, you big baby."

"Yeah, well," Rhodey grumbles. "Not easily." He lands next to Tony. "Also, this is not three hundred yards."

"Really? It feels like three hundred yards."

"It's definitely closer than three hundred yards, boss," Friday chimes in. "Does the location seem familiar?"

"Yes," Tony says. "No. I have no idea. Maybe?" 

Friday's reticle is blinking off to the side on the broad, flat plane of the observation deck. There isn't really much 'castle' to Belvedere Castle—maybe from the right angle, looking across the pond nearby, you could pretend it was a bigger structure than it was, but it was decorative rather than functional. A folly. Tony's mother had built something similar, if smaller, in one of her gardens. 

"Plan?" Rhodey prompts.

"Hang on a second." Something's off. One side of the observation deck is totally free of passers-by. In fact, the people walking by it are going out of their way to not cross past a certain point; they swerve away, falling in arcs towards their destination rather than charging in straight lines. The deck itself looks normal: concrete, stone, a couple of leaves. Friday, for reasons known only to her, highlights a butterfly in magenta on his heads-up display.

"Notice anything weird?"

A beat. Rhodey's thinking. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah. Nobody's over there."

"They're avoiding it," Tony agrees. "Friday?"

"Scanning," she says. "Nothing other than the irregular quantities of Kirby radiation. I'm reading ten to the eighth past usual benchmarks. This may be the cause of the lower temperature."

"Someone was doing magic here?"

"Not necessarily," Friday postulates. "Or if they were, Tony, it may have been up to eight weeks ago. Random fluctuations can also appear independent of any definitive cause. The universe is vast and unknowable."

"Thanks, Carl Sagan." He looks over at Rhodey. 

Rhodey's looking back. "Weird."

"Yeah." Tony starts walking in a pattern, sweeping right and then left in wide zig-zags. Rhodey takes a more direct approach, cutting down the middle of Tony's transverse. The temperature is dropping incrementally as he approaches the edge of the deck, but no alarms have triggered, Friday's detecting nothing, and Tony's not about to try any kind of astral exploration that ends with him blacking out and waking up back in his body.

"Give me the Kirby overlay, Friday," he says. "Rhodey, too." Most of the world goes flat, gray. The people become shifting nebulae with clusters of dark spots; the space in front of him is a miniature supernova. The problem is that Kirby radiation is still, essentially, an unknown. Reed's done some work on it in conjunction with Stephen Strange, but all they've managed to work out is that Kirby radiation sometimes appears as residue from magic. Meanwhile, some magic leaves no detectable traces, or traces that easily vanish against the background noise of the cosmos, on top of which Kirby radiation sometimes appears—as Friday pointed out—randomly, with no discernible origin. Reed had hypothesized that it wasn't tied to the timestream in the way that typical causal chains were, but that doesn't help Tony right now, since he has neither a time platform nor a spell to scry into the past.

"You see anything, buddy?" Rhodey asks.

"Nope. This looks like a dead-end." He takes a couple of steps towards the supernova. The suspension of light shifts as he draws closer, but gently, the way a jellyfish might drift on a current.

"Sure there's no..." Rhodey wiggles his fingers in a way that means _woo-woo._

"Just that." He stabs a finger at the micronova. "Which could be what we're looking for, or could be nothing. I don't think it's worth—"

In retrospect, he should've seen this coming. That's not empty rhetoric. He's a futurist; he predicts possibilities, eventualities. Also, in his career as Iron Man, he's walked into more than one trap that was in retrospect stupendously obvious. This is one of them.

Three things happen at the same time:

The world goes dark except for the overlay on his HUD.

The suit's alarms trigger all at once.

And Rhodey—

Tony isn't proud of this, but for half a second, he gives in to panic. He's in over his head, blinded, trapped inside a coffin he built himself. Because in situations like this, that's all the armor is: a beautiful, extraordinary, bleeding-edge coffin. In the face of an unknown magical threat that Tony has neither the knowledge nor the technology to counter, he's trapped. That's what his body is telling him. Instinct: hard-wired in to ensure the survival of the species.

He sets that aside. Instinct doesn't matter here. Fear won't help him. It isn't a useful response. What matters is reason.

Rhodey says something that would make his mother furious. He draws Tony's attention, and Tony sees twin glimmers of light approximately where War Machine's eyes would be. They may be trapped in the dark, but whatever's doing this isn't blinding the suits or the people inside.

"Friday—lights!"

She triggers the external headlamps. War Machine snaps into existence around his glowing white eyepieces. They're caged in a sphere maybe three meters across—dark, swirling, viscous. Solid. And _shrinking._

Rhodey fires a short, controlled repulsor burst right at the sphere, but it eats the energy up and shrinks a little more. Any minute they're going to be pressed up against each other, which might be fun and flirty under other circumstances but right now brings to mind that scene from _Temple of Doom_ where Indy and Short Round are about to be crushed to death because Willie can't get over her fear of giant, foot-long insects.

Tony's starting to feel far too casual about near death.

"Not trying that again," Rhodey says. "Tony? Thoughts?"

"Probably a bad one, but hang on—"

A few years ago, Tony invented a zero-point energy bubble. He'd been toying with the idea already, but what had finally motivated him to build and test the thing was Victor taking it upon himself to parade into Tony's life. At the time, Tony had been both deeply skeptical of Victor's motives and severely pissed off at the intrusion, so he'd built a cage capable of holding the world's foremost science-wizard. It had required a deep-dive into aspects of quantum field theory that even Tony sometimes struggled to wrap his head around, but the end result of design and refinement was a self-adapting shield that sustained itself with minimal power waste.

The device to deploy and adapt the zero-point energy bubble and its associated abilities has been built into every suit, every workshop, every car, and every home he's had since. The problem here is that zero-point energy is still poorly understood by anyone not named Reed or Lunella; Tony plays with it, but he's not an expert, although at least he is man enough (probably) to admit that he doesn't know how it'll interact with a weird shrinking mystical sphere. They're running out of options, though, and of the seventeen ideas he's generated in the past eight seconds, none seem like better options.

He triggers the bubble. 

-

Tony is tired.

He's well and truly over the passions of his youth. He's exhausted. He hasn't lost his curiosity or his drive to improve the human condition, but both have been and are being tempered by the weight of years lost in pursuit of castles built on clouds. There was a time in his life when he thought he could balance his depravity and self-loathing with being an Avenger, a crusader, a hero. There was a time when he thought he could build himself better, free himself of human frailties like doubt and remorse and the need to sleep. There was a time when he sat down in the snow to die because it seemed like a better option than being Tony Stark for one more day.

But he's past that. He's tired. He has the long view, now; he doesn't apologize for his decisions. They may not be decisions another man would condone, but Tony bases his choices on which outcome will be desirable _defined as_ the greatest good for the greatest number of people. He isn't building the armor into his bones anymore, because it isn't worth the suspicion and fear that his otherness prods awake in other people. It's enough to spearhead solar energy initiatives, to work alongside his team, to live the longest and most useful life he can without alienating everyone around him. 

Or maybe he's lying to himself. Maybe he wants to learn magic for the same reason he once shot himself full of an experimental suspension that rebuilt his body from the cells up. Maybe he was always going to be an addict. 

-

 _"That's_ your plan?"

"We aren't being crushed anymore." Through the hard light of the bubble, the shadow-sphere is still roiling, and the only sound is what might be the howling of distant wind, but they aren't being edged closer and closer together now. "Friday?"

"Compression constant, but the zero-point system is holding," Friday reports. "I have called for assistance."

"ETA?"

"No estimate," Friday reports.

That reaction may make Tony seem blasé about the whole situation, like he's fine with it. He isn't. His heart is hammering in his chest, thundering like a war drum; his pulse is up, respiration up, adrenaline up. He doesn't have a way to regulate those reactions, not like he once did, although the armor has certain aids onboard that he can use in crisis situations. But compared to some of the cruxes he's faced as an Avenger, this isn't even close to a crisis.

"Can you expand it?" Rhodey's asking. "Friday, see if you can—"

A beat. "Unsuccessful," Friday reports. "Energy drain too great. The unknown field is exerting an inward force of—"

"Is the air compressing?" Rhodey says.

"Atmospheric pressure remains constant within the field's spherical confines."

"So either the field is permeable, or it's magic."

"Correct, colonel."

"It's magic," Tony says.

"Or both," Rhodey points out. "Listen, I'm trying not to freak out here."

"But?"

"But nothing. I'm trying not to freak out here. Period. Full stop."

"So much for our armed forces," Tony mutters. 

"You are so going to pay for that later."

"As fun as this is," Friday chimes in, "I must point out that the zero-point bubble is currently—"

It flickers out. The shadows contract. It flickers back into existence, but not before Iron Man and War Machine are forced back-to-back with no more ground to give.

"Unstable," Friday concludes.

"Options," Tony raps out.

"Unknown."

"Dammit, Friday, can you tell me anything useful—

"Unknown. I cannot collect any conventional readings. The field appears blank to most of the suit's sensors."

This is a shitty, terrible way to die. He shouldn't be letting that thought enter his head, but it's there, in the back of his mouth if not on the tip of his tongue. Worse: he dragged Rhodey into this dead-end, too. It may be better than sitting down in the snow and waiting until hypothermia sets in, but not by much.

"Tony, if you've got any magic up your sleeve..."

"I could try a teleportation spell," he says, hopefully sounding less grim to Rhodey's ears than his own, "but I have no idea how it would interact with the thing trapping us, and there's a high probability I wouldn't cast it correctly anyway."

At least they won't asphyxiate. The suits are carrying enough compressed air to last them several days thanks to a technique pioneered by the Kree. More likely is the possibility of being crushed to death inside their armor. Any field that can exert that much counter force on the zero-point bubble is more than capable of outclassing the Iron Man. It's going to be a stupid and humiliating death, although he can't say he's surprised that's how he'll go.

"We can overload the repulser nodes and blow the bubble," he says instead, because you can't give up when your best friend's life is on the line.

"Too risky," Rhodey says, but the energy bubble flickers again. For one-fiftieth of a second: Friday puts the duration right there in front of his eyes. "Fuck it. Fine."

"It'll short out Friday's control. Manual backup process should be available with minimal power."

"See you on the other side, boss," Friday says in his ear, and then she falls quiet. Her last gift is a countdown synchronized to Rhodey's display.

"Ready?" Tony asks.

"Ready. Blowing in three—two—"

And right then, the swirling mass on the other side of the blue cage of the energy bubble parts like someone bored a hole straight through the middle.

"Assistance has arrived," Friday announces.

"Oh," Rhodey says, "you're _shitting_ me."

And Tony says, _"Victor?"_

-

What is can't explain is the slow inevitability of this fall. No; that isn't right. It was never inevitable. But they're past the point of return, because Tony took that last step off the edge with both eyes open, and now he can no more put it back in the box than he can sprout wings and fly. It was fine when Victor was an enemy for whom he had a grudging respect (that mind!) even as he abhorred the man's aims and means. It was fine until Victor decided he was tired of being one thing and would instead be another. It was fine until Victor pushed Tony down the hill that led to the edge and then threw himself down after.

None of this is inevitable, but the more tangled up they become, the more Tony starts to wonder if he really could've been happy with anyone else. Everything is so much easier than it should be; their interests, the way they think, the breadth of what they want, is all exactly even. They share that same clean ruthlessness, the ability to see the most efficient path from Point A to Point B; and if Tony admires that Victor is more able to carry forward on that path no matter the consequences, he thinks Victor is tolerant to the point of appreciating Tony's absurd heroics.

He never has to feel ashamed around Victor. Whatever he's done, Victor has done worse. They're crawling towards the light together. He's never too intense, too busy, too much. When he apologizes, he apologizes not for who he is but for the small, everyday carelessnesses that are a part of any relationship.

And he never feels bored. Victor fascinates; he is fascinated; he is exactly as fascinated with Tony as Tony is with him. They are not equal and opposite but equal and complementary. Tony's never had that before. He's nursing a dawning suspicion that he'll never have it again. This is the beginning. He's just starting to realize that off the edge is the only place to be.

-

Victor has one hand raised as he pours energy into the sphere. What he's doing chases the shadows away, turns them transparent, but the force field holds; he's making no progress.

"Friday, can we get a signal through?" Tony asks.

"Distortion detected," Friday reports. "I believe whatever Doctor von Doom is doing may be causing interference."

No way to communicate. Victor's grim advance is slow; he's fighting against whatever's keeping them trapped. Tony, in what is possibly the stupidest decision yet, hits the manual retraction on the side of his helmet. He looks right at Victor's face. If he's going to die—

Victor may or may not be looking at him; Tony can't tell. It's probably a trick of the light that makes Tony think they catch and hold eyes. Confirmation bias. He wants to think they're looking at each other, so that's what his mind believes. But then Victor jerks and twists to look behind himself, and the shadow starts to creep back over the ozone-hole Victor has burned through the cage holding them.

"He's not gonna do it," Rhodey says. "We should blow the bubble."

Victor holds up one finger. A second finger.

"He'll be back," Tony says.

The hole closes. They're completely trapped again.

"He's not gonna be back," Rhodey says. "Tony..."

-

Tony knows what Rhodey's going to say. Rhodey's going to say: For all we know, he set this trap. Rhodey's going to say: He's not going to put himself on the line to save our skins. Rhodey's not going to say: By any measurable scale you are one-hundred-percent nuts to trust Doctor Doom; but that's what he's going to mean.

Tony Stark has a long, long history of making stupid decisions when he favors his heart over his head. He trusts too easily, picks the wrong people, has a blind spot a mile wide when he thinks he has a shot of worming his way into someone's affections. An outside observer might point out that he has a tendency to fall for people who are willing and able to hurt him. You can build a suit of armor for your body, but you can't build a suit of armor for who you are as a person.

He's been shot by people who were supposed to love him. He's been betrayed. He's been beaten, more than once, to the brink of death, by a person he cared about most. Maybe this thing with Victor is just a natural escalation of his previous flings. Maybe it's less about learning magic than it is about all the ways Victor is going to make him pay.

How much has Victor really turned over a new leaf? That may be the pivotal question, the fulcrum around which Tony's world can turn. By all accounts (SHIELD records, primary sources, an incredulous Ben Grimm), Victor spent the duration of Tony's retreat from consciousness enforcing his new ethical code with the same sort of forceful, inexorable mania he brought to everything he did. Apparently—Tony has this straight from the horse's mouth—apparently, at one point Victor disposed of an entire AIM science island as a special favor for Sharon Carter. And then, after the day that had returned Victor's face to its former painful status, he had withdrawn: no more flashy entrances or displays of cooperative showmanship. But he was still there, sort of, still around to ride in at the last minute and save the day with a wave of his hand. (All that power. It makes Tony shudder, and not in apprehension.)

And now...

Tony's seen some footage. He has the story straight. Victor made big speeches about how he had a _higher purpose_ , about how being a god had _left him wanting_. Atonement was an afterthought. This was simply a new challenge, something Victor felt he could do better than the incompetent fools who had until that point been managing only adequately against the Mad Thinkers and Radioactive Men of the world. If he felt guilt, if he felt shame, it was buried so deeply that Tony had not yet caught a sense of it. Doom did not align himself with right or wrong; he was Doom, and therefore what he did was by definition the right thing. You can build a suit of armor for your body, but you can't build a suit of armor for who you are as a person... can't you?

A year or two of occasional alliance followed by a couple of months of fooling around _(Christ)_ are nothing against the backdrop of the universal whole. Victor isn't being good for Tony. He hasn't stopped trying to take over the world because he's worried about Tony's opinion. They haven't made any promises. What they have is remote sympathy layered over a mutually beneficial transaction—Victor's getting something out of this, even if Tony isn't sure what—like mirrors that face one another at a forty-five degree angle instead of opposing each other directly. Not quite toe-to-toe or back-to-back, but not looking in the same direction, either.

But then he remembers how Victor had behaved in Tony's workshop. Curious; respectful; reverential, even, when he was intent not on Tony but on the things that Tony built. Arrogant, too. And powerfully, overwhelmingly _interested_.

Tony abandons calculation. He shoots from the hip. He takes a leap of faith. 

-

"He's coming back," Tony says.

"There's no reason to believe—"

"I trust him."

The pause that follows fills with all the things that Rhodey's thinking. It's right there, tip of the tongue. The truth is that Tony doesn't care about his own life half as much as he cares about Rhodey's. The truth is that Tony wants and has always wanted someone who not only loves him but who understands him. The truth is that Tony is selfish. Experience should've taught him that he can't have everything, but spoiled rich nightmare that he is, he keeps on trying anyway.

"He's coming back," Tony says, and he believes it right down to his bones. That's what faith is: trust despite experience, despite doubt, despite common sense and reason. When you get right down to it, Tony's a romantic, and the shadows Feynman and Faraday cast in his life are dwarfed by those of Lancelot and Guinevere. Maybe that's the real bottom line. Victor is a complicated, confusing, and sometimes dangerous man, but he's about as darkly romantic as a person can get. Maybe Tony just wants him enough to make up for everything else. Or maybe there's a genuine potential there—something Victor saw years ago and Tony is only beginning to grasp. Victor is going to come back, because Tony trusts him to come back, because Tony trusts him with Tony's life, because Tony trusts him with _Rhodey's_ life, because Tony trusts him to outfight and outthink whatever nebulous force is attacking them. 

"...Okay," Rhodey says. "Okay, Tone." He's resigned; his voice has a color that means he's willing to trade what his better instincts dictate because he can't be the person to burn Tony's hope to the ground one more time. 

"Yeah," Tony says. "Okay."

Friday has a count running in the lower left of his screen; not time elapsed, but time passed. Above it is a smaller number in red: her best estimation of how long until the zero-point net collapses and they'll be crumpled into a small, dense point of matter. 

The small number gets smaller.

"We're down to the wire."

"I know."

"I'm just saying, you know how much of an honor it's been—"

"Rhodey. Stop it." How he shifts and resettles his back against Rhodey's gives away something that Tony doesn't like to give away. "It's fine."

"I know it's fine, I'm just saying that you know—"

"Come on. I always know."

"Okay. Good," Rhodey says. 

There's another scenario in which Victor _doesn't_ come back and Tony and Rhodey manage to engineer themselves an escape anyway. It's a tight spot, but they've seen tighter; Tony knows a little magic and a lot of science, and Rhodey has the best stress reaction of any baseline human Tony has ever met coupled with the kind of quick-thinking and creativity demonstrated only by people who fly very fast, very dangerous pieces of machinery for a living on top of the best training that any human currency can currently buy. They could play that scenario out. Tony could play it out by himself, right now, in his head, but instead he grits his teeth, ignores Friday's dire countdown, and waits.

Thirteen seconds later, his faith is rewarded when the sphere around them shatters like a glass orb dropped on a concrete floor.

-

"So that was fun," Rhodey says, "but I am very late to a very nice date. Also, by 'fun' I mean 'please never call me for backup again.'"

They're back in Tony's lab, having run a full diagnostic on both suits of armor and both pilots (Friday: "I know I've said it before, boss, but you realize I'm not an adequate substitute for a doctor, right?"). Victor is running a simulation using the data Friday and his own onboard sensors gathered; he's ignoring everything else in the room with an impressive display of single-minded focus coupled with a tinge of condescension that is aimed firmly in Tony's direction. That's okay. Tony figures he's earned it.

"This is the part where I say thank you, right?" Tony says.

"This is the part where you delete my number from your phone."

"Can't delete it from my brain, honey," Tony counters with a cheerfulness that definitely isn't not manic. He yanks Rhodey into a hug, and Rhodey grumbles but goes soft against him immediately, claps him on the back a few times, and says, "Be careful, you moron."

"I'm always careful."

"Great," Rhodey says. "Be more careful. Doc…"

Victor confirms that he's only imperiously ignoring Tony when he actually stops what he's doing. It's either a sign of respect or a pointed slight. "Yes?"

"Keep it up," Rhodey says. "This idiot needs more people than just me to watch his back."

Victor sounds amused when he replies, "On that point we agree, Colonel Rhodes."

"Good," Rhodey says. "And thanks for the save. Tony…"

"I _know,"_ Tony says.

"I'm just saying, you'd better," Rhodey says, and then he suits up and takes off. Tony listens for the whine of his jet boots until he can't hear them anymore. Once more into the wild blue yonder. No, wait—that's the Air Force. (Rhodey's echo: _Chair Force._ )

"He's safely off," Friday announces. "Going into standby mode. Wake me if you need me." That's really just a courtesy on her part; she has more than enough attention to spare even though she obviously has projects of her own to tend, but Tony doesn't want to be present in this room right now either.

"Thanks, Friday," he says, and her sleek hologram dims and then vanishes: a trick of the light if ever there was one.

See, here's the thing. Tony's fought with Doctor Doom before. He's just never _had a fight_ with Doctor Doom, and that's so palpably where they're headed that it's all he can do to not reach for his armor. He's braced to do battle; but then Victor undercuts him immediately by saying, "You're bleeding."

"What?" Tony says, and then he becomes conscious of a sting across his face. When he touches the bridge of his nose, his fingers come away tacky with drying blood, and then he remembers his head jolting forward and striking the edge of the meeting room table. "Huh. Would you look at that."

"Come here," Victor says.

"No, it's fine. I have a dermal regenerator somewhere around here—"

"Tony," Victor intones. "You will..." He bites that off. "Please allow me to heal that."

"You know what, Victor?" Tony says, and then in a monumentally dumb display of frustration, he puts his hand over his nose and performs Denak's spell of minor healing. It feels like it worked, even though what he really wants to do is march over to one of his displays to make sure he didn't accidentally turn his skin blue.

"You're being ridiculous." _Flippant,_ is what Victor means.

"Takes one to know one," Tony says, and then, after he spends too long staring down the blank mask across the room, he takes a deep breath. "Sorry. Don't know why I'm so fired up. Thank you."

"What you encountered was residual planar energy from a dimension-walker." Victor clasps his hands behind his back, pinning his cloak to his body; that he's able to do so casually, comfortably, is nothing short of a miracle of engineering. "In its death-throes," he clarifies.

"A higher-dimensional being died in Central Park?"

"Someone murdered a higher-dimensional being in an analog Central Park." Well, that takes all the fun out of an already funless adventure. "You encountered the echo of that violence. It was powerful, but a rarity; I have only encountered two such manifestations before." _And I've been playing around with dark forces since I was in knee-socks_ is the implication; Victor's very into planes and dimensions and alternate realities, which may be a side-effect of his devotion to time-travel or may be an academic fascination all their own. (Would he have worn knee-socks? Are there any pictures?)

Tony realizes something. "Are you trying to... are you trying to make me _feel better?"_

"No."

"It sounds like you're trying to make me feel better," Tony says, incredulous.

"I am merely pointing out"—'merely' nothing, he's starting to sound vexed—"that although you should act with more care, an acolyte of your level of experience, even a very gifted one, would not know how to handle a threat of that order."

"If you're trying to make me feel better about playing damsel-in-distress," Tony says, "just watching you trying to act comforting is doing the trick." Tony can probably count on one hand the number of people who have fondly teased Victor von Doom. What the rest of them may not know is that Victor likes it. He has to; he wouldn't keep hanging around Tony otherwise, collaboration be damned. 

"Does nettling me reassure you about your own inadequacies, or does it simply serve as a distraction from them?" 

"Ouch," Tony says, but cheerfully. Victor can dish it out.

"At least you had enough sense to call me for assistance."

In a calculated maneuver, Tony says, "I didn't. That was Friday." Maybe it's just his imagination that Victor's eyes light up. Not in the figurative sense—his eyepieces quite literally glow green. The effect is demonic. Victor is good at that, at demonic effect, at using every tool at his disposal to intimidate and obfuscate. Tony can appreciate the theatricality now, at least when it isn't being aimed at him.

"Is that so," Victor says. "Then I am glad she did." The imperturbability isn't new, either, but he uses it a lot more, feigning indifference when the last thing Victor von Doom has ever been is indifferent. His hate is raw and naked and sometimes ugly to look at and sometimes just painful; his better passions are the same. Tony has a theory: when you don't wear a mask every hour of every day, you have to pick up a whole new arsenal of tricks. Nothing's there to hide the hurt for you. You have to hide it yourself.

Tony goes over to him and raps his knuckles against Victor's chestplate. "Hey. Take off the helmet."

"Why?"

"I have a question." This all has a point, but Tony's also curious how far and how hard he can push before Victor starts to push back. Although Victor has never refused this particular request, Tony knows how uncomfortable it makes him. How vulnerable.

After a second he hears a click, and then Victor's helmet folds itself neatly back. "Thanks," Tony says.

The scarring on Victor's face is severe. Unless whatever the Hood did involves some sort of self-renewing curse, there's no reason he can't seek out a cure—a restorative spell, gene therapy, Skrull regenerative pills. It has to hurt, to hamper his mobility a little; there's almost definitely nerve damage. And Victor is not the least vain of men. (Takes one to spot one.) He's handsome, sharp-jawed and clear-eyed, and if being a techno-wizard ruler of a small country failed him, he could've always fallen back on modeling. That's how good-looking he was. Is, even, when the right person's looking at him.

That he'll let anyone see his face at all is nothing short of a revolution. Before, you never caught him without the mask. He slept in it, as far as Tony could tell. Now he'll take it off when he's working alone, when Tony's around; he doesn't, thank god, wear it in bed. Tony has been accorded that honor. He suspects he's not the only one, or won't always be the only one, if Victor sticks to his seven-step sobriety plan for quitting world-domination.

"It's occurred to me that maybe the reason this, whatever it is"—Tony gestures between them—"the reason that this works is because of a mutual curiosity. You probably find it pretty easy to figure out what makes people tick, but if I'm half as opaque to you as you are to me, you're going to stick around just to take me apart." Victor makes a noise of what might be assent. His eyes are green. Of course they are.

"So you follow me around," Tony continues. "You let me take liberties. You teach me what I want to know and show up to save my ass. But what I really can't figure out is this." He fits his hand against Victor's jaw and touches his thumb to one of the deep furrows carved along Victor's cheek. "You did this for me. That's as far as I've gotten. I've watched footage from that day and talked to everyone who was there, but I don't know _why."_

Victor's tense beneath his hand, but at least he isn't pulling away. "This is your question?"

"No. What I want to know is..." The million-dollar question. Except it isn't a million-dollar question; it's a zero-dollar question, a question without any value whatsoever. The only thing hanging on this question is a thing that Victor won't come close to comprehending. It matters to Tony, but against the grand scale of the universe, it's meaningless.

He asks anyway: "Was it worth it?"

Victor doesn't lower his faceplate or draw his hood up over his head, but the effect is the same in the way the air around him sharpens. Tony doesn't flinch. Not because he isn't afraid, or because he doesn't care—just because he's too tired to apologize. He isn't too tired to feel guilt, but he's too tired to pay it any mind.

"I sacrificed what I had always wanted," Victor says. "I rejected the promise of a wholeness and an acceptance that had been denied to me my entire adult life. And what you want to know is if I consider you _worth_ it? The arrogance of you. I always knew you for vain, but this is a towering monument to your ego."

"Okay," Tony says. "But was it worth it?"

Victor puts his hand over Tony's and curls his fingers around the edge of Tony's palm. There's nothing affectionate about it. There's nothing romantic; it's a weirdly exact gesture, like he wants to make sure Tony can't pull away from the grotesque feel of the hardened scar tissue that ripples over his cheek. "How quickly do you think?"

"Do you want the answer in megaflops?" Tony jokes.

Victor ignores his flippancy. "Faster than most people?"

"Yes," Tony says.

"Faster than all other people?"

"Most of them," Tony admits. But it's true: even before he started rebuilding himself using artificial hearts and skeletal injections and cutting-edge enhanciles, both before and after he hooked his brain up to the internet—he has always thought faster, harder, broader, deeper, and more thoroughly than almost every other person he's ever met. You learn to downplay it, to learn when you can show it off and when you need to put it in a box; how could you not, without losing patience with everyone around you? It doesn't mean Tony's always right, but it does mean he generates one hundred ideas for every three produced by another person. His brain is always racing ahead of itself, considering and refining a thousand thoughts in parallel. 

"We are alike in that way," Victor says. It is not a question.

"I guess we are."

"Then you understand that when I acted to stop the demon possessing Parker Robbins from casting a spell that targeted you, I did so in full understanding of the consequences despite the limited time to contemplate the outcome."

"Okay," Tony says. That's a _yes._ In four hundred more words than Victor needed. "Why?"

"You always have one more question."

"I get the impression that's what you like about me." 

"You assume too much," Victor says, meaning that's the end of it—once Victor stoops to engaging with Tony's sense of humor, he's just about useless for real conversation. Tony isn't exactly eager to jump into long, fraught discussions about his heart, either; past experience has taught him that relationships where you scream your feelings at each other across a battlefield can be less stable and less rewarding that the kind that are easy, open, not always serene but still operate with the given that you're on each other's side. That he's attempting to build the latter kind of relationship with Doctor Doom is either a hilarious development or proof of suicidal tendencies, but he _is_ trying to build a relationship. Tony's closer to fifty than thirty. He's made his mistakes. He may still be ashamed of what he wants, but he's no longer interested in denying himself in the interest of self-flagellation and penitence. 

"Really?" Tony says. "Because your entire speech there pretty much boiled down to how much you like me. Which is crazy, by the way—you can't have known we'd end up here."

"We haven't 'ended' anywhere. And yes, I could have."

He couldn't—even Tony hadn't predicted this or any other assignation other than casual sex that ended with one of them trying to strangle the other without a safeword. "Sure," he says, "but you didn't."

"Clearly I did," Victor points out.

"Coincidence."

"Good engineering."

"Bullshit." Tony puts his other arm around the back of Victor's neck and threads his fingers through the curls there. Victor's still in his armor. It's not a problem. "You didn't engineer this. Don't play at god and take credit for a coincidence."

"I've been a god," Victor counters.

That's also not a problem. Tony once dug up his best friend's corpse and used an experimental procedure that he'd only tested on himself to resurrect Rhodey. It's far from his worst sin. They're going to run into problems because of that one day; Tony isn't blind, he knows that his own excesses align a little too neatly with Victor's, and even if they don't end up tearing the planet apart in a mad bid to each fix it according to his own design, there's no way that two people who yearn to control every variable around them can function indefinitely as partners without eventually running into deep personal conflict. Eventually they're going to have a serious difference of opinion. A Tony who hadn't lived through the SRA and complete shutdown of his higher brain functions and the incursion crisis would've seen that as a warning sign rather than a challenge, but this Tony isn't going to scrap his car because one day a tire might blow out.

"There are so many bad pick-up lines I could use here," Tony says, "and you wouldn't appreciate a single one of them." He shuffles away from Victor, because one of them has to maintain social boundaries and a conventional sense of how much eye contact is too much eye contact. "You know, back there…" There's a grant for Nadia Pym's G.I.R.L. pulled up in one corner. The only reason Tony hasn't signed on the dotted line yet and sent a few hundred thousand dollars her way is that he wanted to inspect the project details in more depth; there were about fourteen ideas there that were so cutting-edge he'd never even approached them. He starts flipping through the section on nanomachines to keep his hands and eyes busy while he talks. "Rhodey's my best friend."

"I'm aware," Victor says. "In fact, I believe Shi'ar children across the galaxy who have never heard of Iron Man are aware."

"Right. Okay. What I'm saying is, back there, when you busted through the whatever-it-was…" He waits for Victor to jump in with a correction, but for the first time in his life, Victor decides to show some restraint. "Rhodey kept telling me we should blow the zero-point bubble to try to blast our way out. We didn't know if it would work, but he didn't think we could count on you coming back for us." 

"Logical," Victor says. "It wouldn't have worked, but you couldn't have known that."

"I told him to wait." Now Tony does look up, because he wants to watch Victor absorb what he's going to say next. "I told him I trusted you."

"Ah," Victor says.

"And I realize that's a big deal, because it's one thing to trust you with my life, but it's a whole other thing to trust you to pull Rhodey out of the fire. This is hands-down the weirdest relationship I've ever been in, and I'm not sure I've ever had a non-weird relationship. But I trusted you, and you pulled through."

"Seven billion people are waiting to call you a fool should we ever publicly announce our association," Victor says. There's a curious slant to his voice, like he's trying to remain only intellectually interested in Tony's response to all this, but the thing is that it's always been personal with the two of them. It always has been; it always will be. Victor can keep up the pretense of disinterest, but his answer to Tony's _Why me?_ is nothing more than _I wanted you; and I am accustomed to having what I want._

"If you've ever seen any press about me," Tony starts, "you know it's possible that I'm going to be the one to drag your name through the mud. I'm not saying what I said to get you to reciprocate, by the way—you don't need to make any big declarations, but I thought—"

"I trust you," Victor interrupts. "Did you ever doubt it?"

"Seven billion people would say I have good cause."

"Any lackey of mine should have better sense than to bow to mob opinion." _That_ was definitely a joke. "We'll start working on the Sorcerer's Sphere immediately. My initial plan was to give you a more thorough grounding in the basic disciplines, but defensive magic obviously needs to be our priority."

"Oh, well, obviously," says Tony, who has a thousand questions and plenty of time to ask them; and that's how they make their peace.


End file.
